Jean SEGURA                                                                                    

Contact par e-mail : jean@jeansegura.fr

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Jeff Kleiser, pionnier de la 3D  sur le film Tron , co-inventeur du motion capture 

Interview par Jean SEGURA

Jeff Kleiser à Monte-Carlo, février 2000. © Jean Segura

2 février 2000, révisé en 2002

Pionnier de l'image de synthèse 3D, Jeff Kleiser, avec sa société Digital Concept, a fait partie des concepteurs d'effets spéciaux par ordinateur ayant travaillé le film Tron [Steven Liesberger, 1982] produit par les Studios Disney. Avec son épouse Diana Walczak il crée ensuite la société Kleiser-Walczak (KWCC) à Los Angeles et devient un pionnier de la capture de mouvement (Motion capture) appliquée à l'animation de personnages 3D. Début des années 1990 : Jeff et Diana déménagent dans le Massachusetts où ils fondent la société  Synthespian Studios, spécialisée dans l'animation 3D, les effets visuels numériques pour le cinéma et les parcs à thèmes, et la réalité virtuelle. En 1993, la Columbia (filiale de Sony Pictures Entertainement) commande à Jeff Kleiser un relooking en animation 3D de son logo pour son film annonce qui figure sur les génériques de films. Il collabore également avec Douglas Trumbull dans la réalisation de son triptype pour l'Hôtel Luxor à Las Vegas. Il diversifie son savoir-faire avec l'opéra live de Bob Wilson et Philip Glas  tout en continuant de participer à la réalisation d'effets visuels dans de nombreux long-métrages.

Une version de cet interview a été publié sur le site Films Festival.

Jeff Kleiser - Un Américain marginal entre Ouest et Est.

Frère du réalisateur Randal Kleiser, Jeff Kleiser, né à Philadelphie, est diplômé en Computer Science de l’Université de Colgate (New York State). Il fonde au début des années 80 Digital Effects à New York et travaille pour Disney pour réaliser une partie des effets spéciaux numériques de Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982). Il devient ensuite directeur des effets spéciaux chez Omnibus Computer Animation et se distingue pour les effets numériques de Flight of the Navigator (Randal Kleiser, 1986) produit par Disney. En 1987, avec sa femme Diana Walczak, il crée Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company (KWCC) et développe une technique d’animation de personnages 3D basée sur la capture de mouvements (« motion capture » en anglais). Sa compagnie travaille avec Douglas Trumbull en 1992 pour réaliser la partie animation par ordinateur d’un triptyque de films d’attraction destinés à l’hôtel Luxor de Las Vegas. L’équipe de Keiser est également présente sur plusieurs longs métrages dont Chéri, j’ai agrandi le bébé (Honey I Blew up the Baby de Randal Kleiser, 1992), Danger Immédiat (Clear and Present Danger de Philip Noyce, 1994), Stargate (Roland Emmerich, 1994), Judge Dredd (Danny Cannon, 1995), Mortal Kombat Annihilation (John R. Leonetti, 1997), The Rage : Carrie 2 (Katt Shea, 1999) et X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000). Dernièrement il a réalisé The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman pour les parcs à thème Universal Studios et la partie animation par ordinateur de l’opéra de Robert Wilson Monsters of Grace.

Jean Segura : Could you introduce yourself, when and where you were born ?

JK : My name is Jeff Kleiser and I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) and right now I am living in western Massachusetts, in Williamstown. Our office is located in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which is a new large museum. It just opened last May. We’ve converted a large mill space about 1 million square feet into our country’s largest museum of contemporary art and my company is a partner in this museum.

JS : Could you start with the beginning of your career, what was your training  ?

JK : Well, I was a computer science major at school, at Colgate University, in upstate New York. And I ran into some people that were making music with computers and the idea of using computers creatively really appealed to me. And then, but I was much more of a filmmaker than a musician because my older brother  Randal is a filmmaker.

JS : What had been the Randal Kleiser's carrier course as you joined him ?

JK : Randal Kleiser directed Grease, The Blue Lagoon and other feature films, so I inherited a lot of filmmaking equipment from him. And I was much more interested in filmmaking so I began to apply the idea of making images with the computer while in college and formed a major program between the art department and the computer science department, which I called computer graphics. There was nothing at our college at the time. I started working in college. And after school, I formed a company called "Digital Effects", which was the first Manhattan based computer Animation Company. We wrote our own software and we worked on the film Tron. It was our first big break. We were one of 4 companies (1) that worked on Tron and Digital Effects was one of the pioneer companies in the field.

JS : And what did you do on Tron, personally ?

JK: I was animation supervisor for the sequences involving the character called the Bit. We did a title sequence and also this little character that flies around called "the Bit" which says “yes “ and “no”. I was involved in the production team for that project.

And what is your memory about Tron ?

JK: Well, we were all very excited about the prospect of a feature film that depended on computer graphics to tell its story. We all, I think all the companies involved, which was MAGI and Triple I and Robert Abel and Associates and our company, we all imagined that this would open the floodgates for computer graphics in feature films. We all went to the opening in Los Angeles and hadn’t seen the film; of course, we had only seen the scenes that we had worked on. And as we sat at the premier, it became very apparent to us that this was not a very good movie. Visually, it was stunning, but a stunning image doesn’t make a good movie. And the film was not very successful at the box office. And for many years after that, Hollywood just decided that computer graphics was not ready for feature films. We couldn’t get anything going for quite sometime.

And it was right about 1980 and in 1985, I worked on a film that my brother directed called Flight of the Navigator and we did all the exterior spaceship shots with computer animation. We were digitizing the background plates and mapping them, reflection mapping them onto the surface of the spaceship so that it would reflect its environment so that made it look it was really a good part of the scene. Just after that…

JS : And you have many awards for that ?

JK: Oh yeah, I think we won Best the Prix PIXEL [Imagina in Monte-Carlo] for that in ’86 or ’87, ’86 probably. The funny thing is, is that Imagina gives out every year a teapot and the teapot is different every year. Some are made of this and that, and that was the year the teapot was made out of marble and it was about 20 kilos. So, I took this thing back in my luggage and in the x-ray at the airport, they thought it was a bomb or something. “What is this thing?” It’s a huge marble teapot. Anyway after that several films like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 really broke down the barriers of computer graphics being used in feature films and that has led to the current, quite incredible dependence of Hollywood on special effects and computer animation in particular.

JS : OK, you didn’t mention how you created your own company furthermore ?

JK: After Digital Effects, I went to Omnibus to work on Le Vol du Navigateur[Flight of the Navigator, Randal Kleiser, 1986] with my brother. And Omnibus was a Canadian company that raised a lot of money on the Canadian stock exchange and then was unable to pay their bills. They bought Robert Abel and Associates and Digital Productions and tried to corner the market on computer graphics and were not successful and the company went out of business. So, at this point I had met my partner, Diana Walczak, she was a sculptor and a computer science artist and we decided that we should form a company together called "Kleiser–Walczak". We called it a "Construction Company" because we were initially building databases for other production companies. We didn’t have enough money to do full production but we had enough money to get a work station and a digitizer, you know, a 3 space digitizer that would take her sculptures and digitize them and then sell that data to other companies. So, for instance we digitized the Eiffel Tower for a Spanish company and we digitized the human body for Rhythm and Hues and we began building all these different data bases and selling them. Very soon after that we decided we wanted to do our own production and we sort of moved out of data base construction and into creating computer generated characters that we called Synthespian. And did a number of experimental films that were shown at Siggraph and Imagina in the late ‘80’s, early ‘90’s.

Logo de générique Columbia (Sony Pictures Entertainment) relooké 3D par Jeff Kleiser en 1993 © Synthespian Studios

JS : Is it in these movies, short movies, you were one of the firsts to introduce the technique of motion capture.

JK: That’s true, we did a film in 1989 (Don’t Touch me), which depended on motion capture for capture the motion of a performer. In this case, we wrote a song, it was a 3 and a half minute music video. We wrote the song and we had a friend of our named Perla Batya record the voice, the singing. Some friends of ours did all the instruments and then we had Perla, the woman who sang the song, was actually the person that we recorded her in motion. We really didn’t want this to be a, sort of a, tour de force of motion capture, we wanted her just to have a good stage presence, like a performer. So rather than getting a dancer or an acrobat or somebody that was trained in their body motion, we decided to use the singer because she would have the on stage presence that a singer would normally have. And so we hooked Perla up to the motion capture system, which is an optical system in California and recorded her motion, just singing, just moving as she sang to the song, as though she would perform it in stage. So, there weren’t any dramatic pirouettes, or dance movement it was just the performance. That was one of the early instances of motion capture at Siggraph.

JS : Which technique did you use ?

JK : That was an optical system that use reflective balls attached to the different body parts with 6 or 7 camera around the active area.

JS : OK, and when you start to make the different short movies, and after I guess you were involved again in a feature film ?

JK: Yeah, we met up with Douglas Trumbull, who was a visual effects supervisor and he had been involved in 2001, Close Encounters [Steven Spielberg, 1977] and Blade Runner [Ridley Sccott, 1982], and became good friends with him. And he had a project in 1990 that involved creating three different films for the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. He wanted to combine live action, motion controlled photographed models, and computer animation together. He had no experience in computer animation, so he was looking for a company to work with. Diana and I were the only people that were willing to pick up our company and move it to western Massachusetts to work with him because it would have been crazy to try to work with an L.A (Los Angeles) based company and to have the live action models shot in Massachusetts and try and make things match up.

Everybody needed to be under the same roof. So, we moved out there, we hired about 15 people, bought a lot of Silicon Graphics workstations and set up shop in Doug’s studio for a year to do the Luxor project. Then once we got there, we decided that Massachusetts was a much better place to raise our family than Hollywood. So we kept our Hollywood facility open, but we moved essentially to Massachusetts, which is where we live now. After that, we worked on feature films like Stargate, we did that out of our LA office, Mortal Kombat Annihilation and Clear and Present Danger. More recently, Carrie 2: The Rage, which was a film out last summer and currently our feature film division is working on a Fox production of the X Men which will be out this summer.

JS : And could you talk about The Spiderman experience ?

JK : The biggest project we have done so far is one for Universal Theme Parks. It’s called “The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman”. It’s quite a unique design in that the audience is on a motion base, which has 6 degrees of freedom. It can spin around and tilt in all direction and move up and down, forward and backward. That entire motion base is on… “The Spiderman Project” is unique in that the audience is riding on a motion based simulator which has 6 degrees of freedom, it can rotate in all directions, and it can spin around and move up and down and that motion base is traveling on a track which moves through a one and a half dark ride and it goes past 13 different screens onto which is projected our film. The film is 70 mm but is twice the size of normal 70mm, 8 perf / 70 mm film. It is stereoscopic, so you wear polarized glasses and you see 3 –dimensional imagery projected onto the screens.

We took a lot of, it took a lot of effort to integrate the live action set pieces which are around the screen with the imagery that is projected onto the screens, so you really can’t tell where the live world ends and the virtual world begins, all the colors match, all the sight lines are matched, the perspective and as you are moving past the screen we have developed ways of distorting the image so that is counter balances the natural distortion you get when you look at two dimensional image on a screen, you get a sort of distortion. We have rendered the images in such a way that the distortion is compensated for, so you really believe you are looking into a window rather than looking at a screen. And the effect is quite amazing. The people coming out of the ride, 96% of the people have been giving it excellent ratings. It’s done very, very well in the ratings department and when Steven Spielberg rode it, he wanted to go back an ride it, he rode it 3 more times. He rode it 4 times and called it the best ride on the planet, so we felt good about that review. So that is running in Orlando right now.

JK : That was an optical system that use reflective balls attached to the different body parts with 6 or 7 camera around the active area.

JS : How long has been this system running ?

JK : JK: Since May 1999, opened in May, currently running in Orlando. So now we have three divisions, the one, as I mentioned, in Hollywood is working on the X Men, the one in Massachusetts we’re designing a new attraction for a theme park company. This one is very exciting for us, because we have been asked to design it from scratch. We have been asked to create the characters, to write the story, to actually, create it completely from nothing. We have just gotten approval to go ahead and do it. So it will be also a large format stereoscopic project that will be out in about a year. We are not able to talk too much about it here right now but I am hoping to bring it back to Imagina next year when it is finished and show it. Then we have a commercial production office in Manhattan, which we just expanded. There is a company called R. Greenberg Associates that just closed their commercial division, we have hired the core team of their animation department. They are coming over to work for us, so we now have a team of about 12 people in Manhattan that are focusing on commercial work.

JS : How many persons are you employed in the Kleiser–Walczak Company ? And what is your difference in the market of special effects, in front of the well-known companies as ILM or Digital Domain or Rhythm & Hues ?

JK: I guess we are up to about 55 now. I think our biggest strength in relation to those companies is the fact that our company is a partnership between Diana and myself. We are both animators and artists; we have no board of directors, no investors of any kind. We can decide what projects we want to do and decide how much effort is put into those projects. And for us we are all about building our reputation and doing only excellent work. So we can pick out the projects we want to do. We tend to do art projects that are not as lucrative as commercial projects. We always have to balance commercial projects that make money and art projects that don’t have the funding to support them.

We did this 74 minutes opera called Monsters of Grace last year, which was 70mm stereoscopic, all computer animation, with a preposterously low budget. And we were only able to complete that. That was with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. That was performed live in about 110 performances around the world. Philip Glass and his orchestra playing in the pit and our film projected onto a screen behind them for 74 minutes. So, we got a lot of support from Alias Wavefront and Silicon Graphics to do the rendering.

JK : That was a project that we would have never been able to do, to take on, if we had any kind of partners or financial people telling us how or what we should do. Our biggest strength is that we don’t do volume, we don’t do large number of projects. We find the projects we want to do. Diana and I personally direct them and we make sure we have the absolute best team of people, the best equipment to accomplish that project. And we just try to keep it rational and try to keep it at a size where we can compete with those companies, like Digital Domain and Rhythm and Hues and ILM, on a quality level. We are not interested in having 300 or 400 people working for us. We really want to individually, as artists, have an impact on all the projects that we work on and if you go beyond 60 or 70 people, I don’t think you can do that.

JK : That was an optical system that use reflective balls attached to the different body parts with 6 or 7 camera around the active area.

JS : Are you sometimes involved in large project, in the same time as other companies ?

JK : The X Men is a good example of where because of the very diverse nature of the effects. They have lots of different types of effects they want to get done in a very short time. They have contracted with 6 companies to do the effects. We are one of 6. We are working with Digital Domain on a sequence right now where they are dealing with the motion tracking issues and we are dealing with the representation of the characters and creatures in this scene. It is exciting to collaborate with other companies. I think having that flexibility will certainly enable large feature film projects to be done in short amounts of time by spreading it out amongst qualified companies.

JS : Could you tell me about The X Men and who is the director ?

JK : The director is Brian Singer. He did The Usual Suspects and Apt People and it’s a Fox production. Details of the film are not yet releasable.

JS : It’s in progress ?

JK : It’s shooting in Toronto right now. So we have one of our visual effects supervisor named Frank Vitz in Toronto, on set making sure that we get all the information we need, helping with designing the effects. It’s an exciting project because Brian is the sort of director that is always coming up with new ideas, new ways of approaching scenes, even during shooting. Which drives a lot of people crazy because you never know what is going to come up. But I think he is able to really invent on set and come up with things that nobody would have come up with if they had pre-planned everything. It’s not the ideal way from a production crew standpoint but creatively it’s very exciting to be latched on and try to deliver the vision that is evolving in his mind while he’s shooting is very different from most projects that we’ve worked on.

JS : And The X Men, is it inspired from a cartoon or from a comics strip ?

JK : It’s a Marvel franchise, like Spiderman. The X Men are a whole different story with Dr. Rick Xavier, Wolverine and Storm. It’s a whole set of characters that have super powers. It’s a whole series of comic books that were popular, particularly in the U.S. and I guess worldwide as well. This will be Patrick Stewart and Ewan McKellan playing the two major leads. It will be the big special effects film next summer.

JS : : Here at Imagina, you are going to talk about Spiderman? What is the reason ?

JK : My talk tomorrow at Imagina is going to focus on these 2 widely different projects that we produced at the same time. On the one hand there was this avant –gard opera, no budget, very very long, very very slow moving, trying to satisfy Robert Wilson, who is a theatrical designer. And using computer graphics to create this “Robert-Wilsonesque” world for 74 minutes all on computer generated stereoscopic 70mm film.

And on the other side of our studio we are working on “ The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman” which is also a 70mm stereoscopic film but completely the opposite the spectrum in terms of commercial application its for- Universal Theme Park, for mass consumption, all kinds of 3 dimensional effects and trying to pack as much action into as little time as possible. Two completely different projects run through the same facility at the same time and I was going to talk about how each project benefited from the production of the other project in interesting ways. And how the 2 projects affected our artists, and allowed us to develop new techniques for through-put and complicated animation technology. And all different kinds of interesting synergies between the two projects and so that is what I am going to talk about.

Propos recueillis par Jean Segura à Monte-Carlo pendant la manifestation IMAGINA 2000, organisée par l'INA et le Festival de télévision de Monte-Carlo

Société Kleiser-Walczak (KWCC) à Los Angeles lors de sa création en 1987. ©KWCC

NOTES et ANNEXES

La Révolution du film TRON

1. En 1981 Walt Disney se lance dans le projet du film Tron que réalise Steven Lisberger et dans lequel il est prévu d'inclure, pour la première fois dans un long-métrage, de longues séquences en images de synthèse 3D.

Disney fait appel pour ces séquences à plusieurs sociétés pionnières travaillant alors avec des ordinateurs parmi lesquelles : MAGI, Triple-I, Robert Abel & Associates, Digital Productions (DP), et Digital Effects (fondé à New York par Jeff Kleiser).  

                1.1 MAGI

MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) est une société informatique, fondée en 1966 par Phillip Mittelman à Elmsford (New York) pour étudier les phénomènes d'exposition au rayonnement nucléaire.

Ses ingénieurs ont développé un logiciel, appelé SynthaVision, permettant de tracer des rayons de lumière simulant les radiations, réalisant ainsi l'un des premiers systèmes de génération d'images par ordinateur.

Ce système, très robuste, comprenait un modeleur et un outil de lancer de rayon (ray tracing) pouvant générer des images de haute qualité.

L'activité graphique de MAGI, appelée Magi/SynthaVision a été initiée en 1972 par Robert Goldstein. Puis Larry Elin a fondé le Département Animation par ordinateur de 1977 à 1980, dont l'équipe s'est enrichie de Chris Wedge, animateur et artiste (futur co-fondateur des Studios Blue Sky en 1987).

Sur le film Tron , MAGI a eu la responsabilité de la majorité des 15 minutes d'animation 3D dont la fameuse course de « Lightcycles », sortes de motos qui se déplacent à grande vitesse dans un paysage de lignes géométriques.

En 1984, MAGI ouvre un bureau à Los Angeles afin d'être plus près des studios   et Mittelman engage pour s'en occuper Richard Taylor, un ex de Triple-I qui avait supervisé les effets visuels de Tron .

Un essai est réalisé pour Disney, supervisé par John Lasseter, alors débutant chez Disney avant d'être l'un des fondateurs de Pixar.

Dans cet essai, qui a gardé le titre de Where the Wild Things Are , MAGI utilise des scènes 3D, un dispositif de contrôle de caméra et des personnages 2D.

Mais MAGI est finalement revendu à la société canadienne Bidmax, et ses employés dispersés dans d'autres firmes ou universités.

                1.2 Robert Abel & Associates

Robert Abel & Associates a été fondé en 1971 par Robert « Bob » Abel (1937-2001) et Con Pederson qui avait travaillé chez Disney et co-supervisé les effets visuels sur le film de Kubrick 2001, Odyssée de l'espace (1968) avec Douglas Trumbull.

Auparavant, Bob Abel avait travaillé avec John Whitney Sr lorsque ce dernier préparait ses images pour les génériques de Saul Bass.

Il avait par la suite rejoint Con Pederson sur le tournage de 2001... pour l'aider à adapter la caméra utilisée pour les effets visuels.

Mais Robert Abel & Associates assoit sa réputation en fabriquant des effets visuels principalement à destination de films publicitaires pour la télévision : clips Seven up , habillages graphiques pour des chaînes TV comme ABC.

À la fin des années 1970, les studios de cinéma commencent à s'intéresser à son travail : la Paramount lui commande des maquettes pour Star Trek: le film, de Robert Wise.

Mais après un an de travail, Paramount, peu satisfaite des résultats, préfère confier à Douglas Trumbull la quasi-totalité du travail des effets visuels.

En novembre 1976, John Hugues (futur fondateur des Studios Rhythm and Hues) est engagé par Bob Abel et se charge du système de contrôle de la caméra par ordinateur : un dispositif assez complexe à six degrés de liberté qui permet la prise de vue automatisée d'effets lumineux directement sur pellicule.

Le système sur lequel John Hugues est très similaire au "Slit Scan" mis au point par John Whitney Sr (dont le principe a été repris par Doug Trumbull dans 2001 ).

Bob Abel et Con Pederson avaient eux aussi travaillé avec Whitney.

La programmation du contrôle de la caméra se fait sur un microprocesseur Motorola à l'aide une bande de papier perforée.

Le microprocesseur décode ces informations pour transmettre les instructions de mouvements de la caméra, les calculs étant exécutés sur un ordinateur Red Core.

Un peu plus tard Abel investit dans un DEC PDP 11-03 de Digital Equipment et ensuite dans un PDP 11-60, avant de passer sur de plus grosses machines.

Abel s'est également équipé d'un système d'affichage graphique vectoriel PS2 d'Evans & Sutherland qui permet de prévisualiser sur écran ce que le système de motion control va faire.

Cela dessinait des lignes. En plaçant les lignes les unes à côté des autres on pouvait former une surface solide.

En utilisant des filtres de couleurs on pouvait colorer ces surfaces. C'est ainsi que, sur une machine vectorielle, Bob Abel et son équipe ont commencé à faire les premières images infographiques.

À partir des années 80, Abel constate que les systèmes raster (à balayage de trame) sont plus flexibles et offraient de meilleures capacités de contrôle que l'affichage vectoriel.

Abel et son équipe ont alors écrit des logiciels adaptés à l'affichage raster : un modeleur, un outil destiné aux déplacements des caméras et à l'animation des objets et un logiciel de rendu. Ainsi qu'un module de compositing, mais assez primitif.

Ce logiciel sera par la suite développé par la société Wavefront Technologies, lorsque Bill Kovacs (l'un de ses fondateurs) va en racheté la licence en 1987.

Dans Tron , Robert Abel & Associates a réalisé seulement la séquence en graphique vectoriel de l'entrée dans la ville.

Aujourd'hui Abel reste connu pour le le clip Brilliance (plus connu sous le nom de Sexy Robot ) réalisé par Randy Roberts. On lui doit également la séquence d'ouverture de la série télévisée Amazing Stories produite par Spielberg.

En 1986, Robert Abel et Digital Productions ont été revendues à la firme canadienne Omnibus.

Au début et jusqu'au milieu des années 80, Robert Abel a fait partie d'un trio de tête avec Pixar et Digital Productions.

PDI, fondé en 1980 par Carl Rosendhal est devenu par la suite un autre acteur important de ce marché.

                1.3 Digital Productions et Whitney Demos Productions

Le fils de John Whitney, John Whitney Junior (né en 1946) et son frère Michael (1947) font leurs premières armes sur le système analogique de leur père, le premier en réalisant Terminal Self   (7 mn), et le deuxième avec Yin Hsien (1975, 8 mn).

John Jr poursuit le travail de pionnier de son père : après un court passage dans la société Pictures Design Group où il rencontre Gary Demos, avec qui il rentre chez Triple-I et où ils restent de 1974 à 1981.

Tandis que chez Triple-I, on commence à travailler sur le long-métrage Tron , Demos et John Jr fondent en 1981 leur propre société, Digital Productions (DP).

Les deux associés prennent le risque d'investir 12 millions de dollars dans un super ordinateur, le Cray X-MP, avec pour finalité de faire de l'image de synthèse une véritable activité commerciale.

DP réalise ainsi quelques effets spéciaux pour le cinéma comme dans Starfighter ( The Last Starfighter , 1984, Nick Castle) ou 2010, l'année du premier contact ( 2010 , 1984, Peter Hyams) dans lequel il fallait simuler la surface de Jupiter.  

DP produit également le clip musical de Mick Jagger Hard Woman (1985) dont les images de synthèse 3D sont réalisées par Bill Kroyer.

Mais Digital Productions ne parvient pas à survivre économiquement.

Après son rachat par la société canadienne Omnibus (qui disparait à son tour), John Junior et Gary lancent en 1987 Whitney Demos Productions en investissant dans un ordinateur de Thinking Machine sans grand succès.

                1.4 Digital Effects   (DP)

Digital Effects est une société fondée à New-York par Jeff Kleiser (voir interview) 

SYNTHESPIANS

2. synthespians : In general, virtual humans employed in movies are known as synthespians, virtual actors, vactors, cyberstars, or "silicentric" actors. (Source : Wikipedia)

SYNTHESPIAN STUDIOS

3. Synthespian Studio  owned by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, who together and with expert teams, have pioneered computer-generated characters, digital stunt doubles, digital face-replacement, crowd replication, particle systems, and stereoscopic location-based entertainment. Clients include Universal, Disney, Sony & Columbia, and Bose. (Source : Synthespian Studios)

Jeff Kleiser - Filmographie/Filmography

1999 : The Rage: Carrie 2 (Katt Shea). JK, co-executive producer with Diana Walczak.

1997 : Mortal Kombat Annihilation (John R. Leonetti).

1995 :Judge Dredd (Danny Cannon)

1994 :Stargate (Roland Emmerich). JK, co-digital visual effects executive producer with Diana Walczak.

1994 : Clear and Present Danger (Philip Noyce). Titre français Danger Immédiat. JK, computer animation supervisor

1992 : Honey I Blew up the Baby (Randal Kleiser). Titre français Chéri, j’ai agrandi le bébé.

1982 : 1986 : Flight of the Navigator (Randal Kleiser). JK, special effects supervisor.

1982 :Tron (Steven Lisberger). JK, computer production supervisor.

1980 :The Blue Lagoon, (Randal Kleiser). Titre français: Le Lagon bleu. JK, special optical effects.

Jean SEGURA